Law and Politics Commons^™

The Future Of Materialist Constitutionalism, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This is a review essay of Camila Vergara, Systemic Corruption (Princeton 2020). In this lively and important book, Vergara argues that corruption should be given a structural definition, one that connects corruption with inequality and is plebeian rather than elitist. After surveying the work of thinkers from Machiavelli to Arendt, she proposes a set of solutions grounded in the civic republican tradition.
/="/">
/="/">I press several points in my essay. First, Vergara's linkage of corruption with inequality is promising, but introduces tension between a general problem (domination of the many by the few) and a more specific problem (the …

Book Review, Secular Surge: A New Fault Line In American Politics, Bruce Ledewitz

Ledewitz Papers

Published scholarship collected from academic journals, law reviews, newspaper publications & online periodicals

Facebook And Politicians’ Speech, Sarah C. Haan

Scholarly Articles

In his Article Facebook’s Speech Code and Policies: How They Suppress Speech and Distort Democratic Deliberation, Professor Joseph Thai argues that Facebook skewed public debate with a policy that exempted politicians from its content-based rules. This Response updates the reader on Facebook’s retreat from this policy and identifies some preliminary lessons from it. Between May 2020 and January 2021, Facebook moved away from its “light touch” regulation of politicians’ speech by employing strategies like labeling and down-ranking—and, eventually, removal of content. After the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Facebook de-platformed President Trump altogether, putting a final …

Creating Space For Community Representation In Police Reform, Ayesha Bell Hardaway

Faculty Publications

Input from affected communities is an essential component of the reform process aimed at remedying unconstitutional police practices. Yet, no court in DOJ-initiated police reform consent decree cases has ever granted a community organization’s motion to intervene as a matter of right. Judicial opinions in those cases have largely truncated the Federal Civil Rule 24 analysis when evaluating the interests of impacted communities. Thus, the most success achieved by a small few has been permissive intervention or amici status. The models used by the Department of Justice to elicit the community perspective have largely been frustrating and have failed to …

Transforming Restorative Justice, Jennifer Llewellyn

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

From the global pandemic to the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too/Times Up and Indigenous reconciliation and decolonisation movements, the systemic and structural failures of current social institutions around the world have all been brought to our collective consciousness in poignant, painful and urgent ways. The need for fundamental social and systemic transformation is clear. This challenge is central to the work of dealing with the past in countries undergoing transition and in established democracies confronting deep structural inequalities and injustices. Rooted in lessons from the application of restorative justice across these contexts, this article suggests that grounding restorative justice …

Regulating The Political Wild West: State Efforts To Disclose Sources Of Online Political Advertising, Victoria Smith Ekstrand, Ashley Fox

Journal of Legislation

The problem of disinformation in online political advertising is growing, with ongoing and potential threats to campaigns coming from both within and outside the United States. Most scholarship in this area has focused on either disclosures and disclaimers under the proposed Honest Ads Act or other fixes aimed at a gridlocked Federal Election Commission (“FEC”). With federal reform at a standstill, states have jumped into the void. Between the 2016 presidential election and early 2020, eight states passed legislation to expressly regulate online political advertising for state candidates and ballot measures, including Maryland, whose state law was declared unconstitutional as …

State Attorneys General, Political Lawsuits, And Their Collective Voice In The Inter-Institutional Constitutional Dialogue, Mark C. Miller

Journal of Legislation

No abstract provided.

The Wolf We Feed: Democracy, Caste, And Legitimacy, Benjamin Justice, Tracey L. Meares

Michigan Law Review Online

Procedure is central to American public legal discourse. From the soaring rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the American legal tradition rests on the principle that law must be both derived and applied according to fair process. Consider that in the 2020 election the Trump Administration resorted to fervent and false allegations of widespread voter fraud—that the election process was fundamentally unfair—in order to weaponize Republican voters’ ostensible commitments to fairness against what was, objectively, one of the least procedurally unfair elections in history. Yet the four-year period of the Trump …

The Injustices Behind America’S Incarceration Boom, Jay Widlacki

Undergraduate Research Symposium

America’s mass incarceration system functions as a tool to keep their black communities impoverished and powerless. Black people are locked away at disproportionate rates; moreover, statistics suggest that the criminal justice system is racially biased at every step. These two systems work together to keep an alarmingly high amount of black people behind bars so businesses can profit off of them. If ex-convicts leave the prison, they will find it hard to reintegrate into society because of the post-prison fees, parole requirements, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. Without rehabilitation available in most prisons, these barriers make the prison system akin to a …

Introductory Remarks, Michael Rogers, Hannah Hamley, Rayshaun D. Williams

Seattle University Law Review

Introductory Remarks.

The Participation Principle And The Dialectic Of Sovereignty-Sharing, George K. Foster

Seattle University Law Review

States around the world are ceding authority to international institutions, devolving powers to lower-level political subdivisions, and granting forms of autonomy to Indigenous peoples and other minority groups. At the same time, states are increasingly offering groups and individuals “participation rights”: opportunities to participate in sovereign prerogatives without exercising control. These opportunities range from providing input into environmental decision-making, to collaborating with law enforcement in community policing programs, to receiving a share of natural-resource revenues. This Article contends that all of these developments represent a dividing up of the collection of rights known as sovereignty, and that participation rights reflect …

Dobbs And The Fate Of The Conservative Legal Movement, J. Joel Alicea

Scholarly Articles

The conservative legal movement finds itself at its most precarious point since its inception in the early 1970s. That might sound implausible. The last four years saw the appointment of three Supreme Court justices, dozens of appellate judges, and nearly 200 district court judges—almost all coming from within the ranks of the conservative legal movement. Conservatives on the Supreme Court now (ostensibly) hold a 6–3 majority, making it, in all likelihood, the most conservative Court we will see in our lifetimes. It would thus be easy to conclude that the conservative legal movement is at its apogee.

But it is …

The Biden Administration’S Decision To Rejoin The World Health Organization: A Power Move Or A Faulty Move?, Veronica J. Mina

Maryland Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Environmental Governance At The Edge Of Democracy, Joshua Ulan Galperin

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Private environmental governance describes the affirmative efforts of private organizations to deliver public environmental goals, such as climate change mitigation, without government leadership or control. The scholarship on private environmental governance has grown quickly over its short life, but has largely described, catalogued, and quantified private environmental governance. This article begins the project of more fully theorizing private environmental governance. It is the first to explore and critique its political and democratic roles and responsibilities.

This article argues that despite the promise that private environmental governance is private and therefore “beyond politics,” it in fact calls loudly for democratic consideration. …

A Page-Turner With A Social Conscience: Requiem For A Female Serial Killer By Phyllis Chesler, Paula J. Caplan

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Political Climate And Catastrophes: The Effects Of Notorious Events On Public Library Collections, Both Then And Now, Joseph A. Custer

Faculty Publications

This paper explores four different cases in the early 1950s of “Red Scare” tactics that influenced the freedoms that patrons using public libraries have enjoyed. The paper will also examine, at various points, the censorship parallels in the early 1950s to the contemporary political climate and the fallout of the Great Depression to the current catastrophe, COVID-19. The paper reviews the fallout from the Great Depression and how the world’s depression helped catapult Adolph Hitler of Germany to power. Hitler severely restricted or eliminated freedoms of expression, and the Trump administration’s actions reflect some of those same restrictions.

The Non-Lawyer Attorney General- Problems And Solutions, Andrew Flavelle Martin

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, I provide a legal and policy analysis of the non-lawyer Attorney General and recommendations for legislative change. I begin in Part 1 by setting out and assessing Askin and its uptake in the case law and literature. I demonstrate that while the decision in Askin has two major weaknesses, the reasoning is presumably applicable across the country.7 In Part 2, I examine the legal consequences of Askin and its policy or practical consequences. I argue that it threatens the government’s solicitor-client privilege and that it leaves the non-lawyer Attorney General unconstrained by the law of lawyering more …

Political Executive Control Of The Administrative State: How Much Is Too Much?, Conor Casey

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Donald Trump, Constitutional Failure, And The Guardrails Of Democracy, Julie Novkov

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

No Voice, No Exit, But Loyalty? Puerto Rico And Constitutional Obligation, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Michigan Law Review is honored to have supported Professors Charles and Fuentes-Rohwer's Essay on the subjugated status of Puerto Rico as an "unincorporated territory." This Essay contextualizes Puerto Rico not as an anomalous colonial vestige but as fundamentally a part of the United States' ongoing commitment to racial economic domination. We are thrilled to highlight this work, which indicts our constitutional complacence with the second-class status of Puerto Rican citizens and demands a national commitment to self-determination for Puerto Rico.